Rajasthan: Gehlot's waiver worries

Fake beneficiaries may turn the Congress's poll plank of extending loan waivers into a headache.

Rohit Parihar

Jaipur February 15, 2019

ISSUE DATE: February 25, 2019

UPDATED: February 15, 2019 12:46 IST

offline

Proxy war: Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has ordered a probe.

A farm loan waiver of up to Rs 50,000, announced by the previous BJP government and rolled out in all the 33 districts of the state in early February, has put the Ashok Gehlot government in a bind, when it was hoping instead to win some goodwill from the move in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

The matter came to light after protests broke out over the list of loan waiver beneficiaries in the Large Multipurpose Agricultural Societies (LAMPs) of three villages--Govadi, Gamda Bamniya and Jethana, of Dungarpur district.

The list of beneficiaries allegedly included names of people who had not received loans in the first place. These 'beneficiaries' staged a protest outside the district administration, claiming they hadn't taken any loan and demanded police action against those who had misappropriated funds using their names.

The one-time loan waiver of up to Rs 50,000 for small and marginal farmers who had defaulted on short- term loans from cooperative banks was to have been extended to loans from all banks and up to Rs 2 lakh. The promised state largesse was a key poll promise of the incumbent Congress government. The Gehlot government has been under pressure from the opposition for the delay in processing the farm loan waiver, which was to be done by the end of December last year, as promised by Congress president Rahul Gandhi. The state government has so far distributed loan waiver certificates worth Rs 3,100 crore and it has also estimated that the loan waiver will cost the state Rs 18,000 crore. Neeraj K. Pawan, registrar, coop- erative department, told india today that 43 of the 127 active LAMPS of Dungarpur are under investigation. Pawan even admitted that the man- ager had falsely listed beneficiaries as the eligible beneficiaries couldn't be Aadhaar verified. While the government has insisted that only genuine, Aad- haar-verified farmers will get the benefit, an inquiry into the loan waiver lists submitted by 19 of these societies has revealed that 7,700 of the 10,600 names are wrong. Of the estimated 2.6 million eligible beneficiaries of the Rs 50,000 loan waiver, the government suspects the number of fake claimants could be around 200,000. The authorities are yet to find out who really benefitted from the false waiver claims. In Kota, the district authorities have accused three cooperative officials of using the names of 49 farmers to pocket waivers worth Rs 34 lakh. As reports of the fraud in Dungarpur became known, similar reports started pouring in from other districts. Sources say the police have refused to lodge a case in Dungar- pur, terming it a civil matter. An alarmed Gehlot government has set up a committee of ministers, headed by urban development and housing minister Shanti Dhariwal, to identify the real beneficiaries and work out the modalities of the loan waiver again. Meanwhile, deputy chief min- ister Sachin Pilot has described the forgery in the loan waiver scheme as a heinous crime and promised that the state government will ensure that only genuine farmers get the benefit.

Get real-time alerts and all the news on your phone with the all-new India Today app. Download from